CHAPTERXII.

CHAPTERXII.THE HISTORY OF MUFFINS.—THE ORIGIN OF BUTTER.—THEENGLISH BREAKFAST.The day we landed at Rabat we heard a little tinkling bell through the street, just like the four o’clock muffin-bell in London. One of the party asked if it were tea-time amongst the Moors, and the others laughed, thinking it a good joke:—there was no joke in the case. These cockney cakes are just as common here as within the sound of Bow bells, and served for breakfast in Barbary when Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honour had for theirs beefsteaks and ale, or herrings and bread and cheese. They are a little larger than those in London, and exactly thepeikletsof the midland counties.To find muffins and crumpets here is, indeed, in the language of modern philosophy, a “great and a twofold fact.”[118]It is, however, one which great men have overlooked; because, although a cook must be a philosopher, it is not required that a philosopher should be a cook.The incident set me upon considering the nature of the muffin, and opened to me a large field of speculation, culinary and historical. I first perceived that there were combined in the greasy accompaniment of our tea-tables characters so diverse, that it must have a history, and an eventful one; that it must have undergone vicissitude and persecution in the course of its wide career, the range of which in space and time could not be doubtful, from the place in which I found it.Let me dispose first of the wordcrumpet: it is clearly a recent one. Peiklet is still used in the interior of England, and one name is given to both by Moors and Jews,sfen; I shall, therefore, equally employ for both the word “muffin.”[119]The muffin isbread,cake, anddish:[120]like the first, it is fermented; like the second, baked or toasted on a griddle; like the third, it requires to be cooked before it is eaten. Our method of cooking, by toasting first and then softening by butter, appears at the first glance the travestie of some lost method. The use of the toasting-fork could not have preceded coal-fires and grates with upright bars, an invention not earlier than the Georges; nor could it have preceded the use of butter, which cannot be traced beyond the Dutch stadtholder. In America, they do not toast and butter muffins, but eat them hot, as baked. They were, therefore, originally a part of the regular cookery of the country, and, indeed, could not belong, as at present, to “breakfast” and “tea,” which meals are of recent invention. Morocco presents the original practice: here they are simmered in oil or butter, and then dipped in honey. I did not see them used in dressed dishes; but Marmol, writing two centuries ago, describes them as employed in this manner. He says, “In Morocco, there are two ways of making bread—baking in an oven, as we do in Europe, and preparing it in pans to be eaten hot with honey and butter, or with oil. These cakes are sometimes stewed with the flesh of goats, for that of sheep is difficult to be got at, and that of cattle they do not consider wholesome.”[121]The Moors and the Jews cook them differently, the former using butter, the latter oil: they thus connect baking and cooking, and illustrate differences between Judaism and Islam, or, perhaps, between Jew and Gentile. With these data it may be worth while to endeavour to find traces of them in ancient times.Baking in Greece had attained to the highest perfection, as exhibited in separating or bolling the flour,[122]and in kneading the dough.[123]The art of baking, as connected with religious festivals, possessed an importance which, to us, is inconceivable. Among the Greek states, Athens was most distinguished for its bread; yet there were there foreign bakers—and these Lydians.[124]There was bread known by the name of Cappadocian, and the Phœnicians were held bakers of first repute. This people was said to possess as many kinds of bread as there were days in the year: their merit, however, does not seem to have consisted in baking, properly so called, but in combining preparations of flour with other viands; and in the Old Testament we have constant references to the mixtures of flour with oil and honey, all which approach to the Moorish sfen.The names of only three out of the three hundred and sixty-five kinds of Phœnician bread have been handed down: the three resemble one another. This must have been the kind of bread for which Phœnicia was celebrated, and the descriptions apply to the muffin and the sfen, still preserved in countries which they colonized. The three kinds arelackmar,chebrodlapson, andmaphula: lackmar is evidently derived from lackma, to swallow (whencelick), and must have been remarkably soft. Athenæus calls it“ἄρτον ἁπαλόν.”It was prepared with milk and oil: the Syrians were celebrated for making it. That it was known to the Jews is proved by the wordlachmanigoth, which occurs in the Talmud.[125]It was known to the Arabs, and is described by Mininski as a fritter of flour, dried grapes, oil, and fresh wine: of chebrodlapson, we only know that it was prepared with honey. How these were baked is not stated; but the third, maphula, was not fired in the oven, but on the hearth, or on a griddle. In the three collectively, we have all the ingredients and the methods at present in use in Morocco,[126]viz. flour, milk, oil, honey, and a griddle for firing them.In maphula, we have the word employed in England. Taking away the final vowel added by the Greeks, and changinglfor its cognaten, maphula or mufula becomes mufun.[127]These names have puzzled the most learned. Bochart avows his perplexity; Casaubon avers that “we ought not to be ashamed of confessing our ignorance of what we do not know, and,ipso facto, confesses his own.” Their difficulties disappear, as usual, before the knowledge of habits. Flour, milk, oil, and honey mixed up together would, indeed, form a sorry dish; as the critics, not being cooks, could not devise the process by which they could be converted into a palatable one. Bochart, with his usual sagacity, has detected the union of cooking and baking, and also that the Jews and Arabs cooked the muffin differently. He has, however, mistaken the distinction; he makes the Jews use oilorbutter, the Arabs fat: the Jews cook it in oil only, the Arabs prefer butter.The griddle on which muffins are baked in London,[128]is precisely the same as that used in the East, and fixed in the same manner over the fire. It serves for a variety of other dishes and preparations of flour.[129]On it is made the pastry of the East, which all travellers have tasted, which many have pronounced exquisite, and yet which none have described, or suspected, perhaps, to be different from that of Europe.The secret of French pastry consists in bringing the butter and the dough to exactly the same consistency: this is effected by temperature for the butter, by water for the dough, cooling down the one or softening the other. When so adjusted, the butter in one mass is covered in;[130]it then spreads under the rolling-pin equally as the dough spreads, each in its own plane. Folded over and over again, the two keep distinct, and thus are obtained the flakes.The butter of the East is fluid, and runs like oil; how, then, can they have flake-pastry? It was this difficulty which spurred their invention, and produced the unrivalled method which I shall now describe.Wheat is steeped till it sprouts; it is then rubbed down, or pounded in a mortar, till it acquires the consistency of cream. In this state it is poured in ladles on the griddle, rubbed with butter. Instantly hardening, it is tossed off, sheet after sheet: the name isyoufka.[131]It is then strung, and hung up: when wanted, a bundle of it is laid into the dish, ortaien,[132]for the under-crust; the contents, sweet or savoury, of the pastry, are then put in, and the upper-crust in the same manner laid on. By this process are attained, in the highest degree, all the objects of French pastry—fineness of flour with a certainagro dolceflavour, softness in the substance, fineness and equality in the flake. It has the advantage, also, over our pastry, of facility and economy of time.Old Arabic writers mention two kinds of food prepared by makingKhebes, which are compared to the banana andNeïdehdescribed by Abd Allatib, as follows: “Wheat is soaked until it sprouts; it is then boiled until its whole substance passes into the water; the water is then clarified, and boiled down until it gets thick; at this point a little flour is thrown in, and it sets; it is then taken from the fire, and sold at the price of bread.” This isNeïdeh Albousch; but when no flour is added, and it is boiled until it coagulates, it is better and sells for a higher price, and is calledNeïdeh Makoudeh.[133]Soyonti speaks of it as one of the things in high estimation in Egypt, and quotes an old writer, who says that it was discovered by the Virgin Mary. Being without milk, she was inspired with the idea of preparing it for the Infant Jesus. P. Sicard saw this dish at Meuschieh, and thus describes it: “The grain is steeped for several days till it sprouts; it is then dried, pounded or ground, and boiled for use. A sweet and agreeable confection is then made without sugar, and the people of the country esteem it much, and are very fond of it.”[134]In the time of Sonnini it had disappeared from Meuschieh. Here we have the steeping of the grain, the grinding, and the diluting of it in water, as in the present Eastern pastry. Although we have not the toasting of it on the griddle, more cannot be wanted to carry this process back to ancient times, and to those celebrated baker-cooks of Tyre and Sidon.The neïdeh is still preserved in Britain under the name ofFrumentyorFurmity. The method of preparing it is now in the hands of a few persons only, and has become a secret; and, probably, in another generation it too will have died out, under the crushing roller of subdivision of labour. Where still used, it is only on one occasion in the year,Mid Lent Sunday. When brought to market it is of the consistence of thick gum. Those who have eaten it describe it as an excellent dish. The festival when it is used may have some connexion with the Arab tradition concerning Mary’s milk.[135]In the Highlands there is at once the neïdeh, the cadaëf, and the youfka; not, however, by malting, but by fermentation. Oat seeds are steeped for ten days till they ferment, the water is then boiled till it thickens. This issowans;[136]or it is poured on the griddle and made intoscons,[137]which are used on festal occasions, but chiefly at Christmas.[138]That the Highlanders understood malting is shown in their whiskey, which they did not wait for Paracelsus to teach them to distil.The first step in preparing flour or meal for food, is the ashes on the griddle; the next and last is, the oven. The peculiarity of bread resides in the baking in the oven; fermentation is called in as an auxiliary: the process is elaborate and complicated. When first invented, the oven and its produce, the baking and the bread, would be known by the same name. In early times words had to do severe duty. A soft flat roll, resembling the common bread of Barbary, is called in Scotland,bake. If so called because it is baked, it must have been so at the origin of baking. “Bake” would thus belong to the earliest ages, and go back to the first discovery of an oven, which, by one peculiar and horrid ceremony, we can trace to Sabæa.[139]Now, this very word is written in a book two thousand three hundred years ago, and then as an old one—as one of the oldest in use among men.[140]There we learn that the Phrygian name for bread wasbake; bake was, therefore, asked for three thousand years ago, by Pelethite or Cerethian at Escalon or Gorja, just as to-day by the barefooted callant of Paisley or Linlithgow. It may be objected that the word, if in use in Canaan, would not have been mentioned as Phrygian; but the colony may have retained an ancient word which the metropolis had lost,[141]or the metropolis may, without losing the one, have introduced new names for new inventions. The Phœnician words which have been preserved are of that description. Lackmar, Chebrodlapson, are fine terms, such as would strike strangers more than the homely one in common use. The Egyptians, besides, were not given to travel; and with shoals of travellers and clouds of books, see how difficult—nay, impossible, it is to get at the simple things of any country.However, “bake” and “muffin” do not stand alone: they are accompanied by a goodly array of emigrants from the Holy Land. I adduce them, not to prove any affinity of Hebrew and Celtic, or of Indo-Germanic and Semitic, but to establish the intercourse of our forefathers with those countries. Thus have come to uscake,[142]bun,[143]scon,[144]sowans,[145]bread,[146]broth,bear[147](old Teutonic for grain),beer,barley, and I may, perhaps, addham[148]andmeat,[149]which, with those given before, make a baker’s dozen.I will now leave it to the antiquarian to determine whether sfen came hither with the “diggers” for tin, or with those later “Afers,” whose persons and wares increased in the eyes of William the Norman, as the author of “Harold” narrates, the attraction of the capital of England. But anyhow, this remains certain, that muffins and crumpets were served at Hiram’s table.A stranger from Europe is little surprised to findbutterin Morocco. I had spent years in the East, and never had seen butter. I had myself introduced it both in Greece and Turkey; what, then, was my surprise to find it here. You may see in a boy’s hand a roll sliced—yes, sliced bread in a Mussulman’s hand, with a lump of butter inside for his breakfast, just as in England. It is pale, sweet, cowslip-flavoured, and smelling of the country[150]—I mean the country of England. To us butter comes so naturally—it is so necessary—that we cannot imagine ourselves without it, nor call up the difficulties in the way of its first discovery, which is one of the latest of uncivilized articles among the barbarous.We read of butter in ancient times, but it wasgee. The merit of ours is its being made from cream thrown up cold. The milk of kine alone has that property; and that milk during many centuries was unknown to man as food.The great event of primeval society was the employment of cattle in tillage. To preserve and increase the breed was the first care of legislators: this they effected by consecrating the cow,[151]and its milk was surrendered to its own offspring. The practice outlived the occasion; and it was not till horses came to be substituted for oxen in the flat lands of the north that cows’ milk returned into general use,[152]as it had originally been among nomade tribes. Cream was unknown to all antiquity. There is not even the word in any ancient language. This statement will appear extraordinary, and may, perhaps, be set down as contrary to reason and unfounded in fact, for reference to cream in so many authors will immediately recur. The fact is, that none of those who have illustrated ancient manners and language have noticed this point, and they and travellers have not been conversant with the dairy; consequently they have transferred their own ideas to the languages they translated, the usages they described, or even the very things before their eyes.[153]Up to the time of this discovery the diet consisted, as in the East, of a repetition of the same meal twice in the day. The breakfast differed not from the dinner, except that it was a smaller meal—the dishes were the same. Butter revolutionized the kitchen. About the same time two remarkable adjuncts to our diet were introduced from China and Arabia, tea and coffee. In their native countries they were no part of the people’s food, and furnished forth no meal; they were only used as a slight refreshment. In our adaptation of them they lost their flavour,[154]and no longer served their original purpose. Our coarse preparation required to be mellowed by cream or milk, and sugar. With the aid of butter, they assumed the consistency of a refection, and with eggs, in the shell,[155]of a meal. This did not, however, suffice as a substitute for both meals. Beef ruled the evening repast: the road diverged; two distinct meals came into existence, and the “English breakfast” assumed its dignified station in the domestic world. It has spread far and near, but only where preceded by the discovery of cream, and accompanied by the manufacture of butter. Morocco having butter, has the two descriptions of meals.They make their butter without churn or cream. A goat’s-skin, with the hairy side in, is filled two thirds with milk; four poles or reeds, six feet long, are set up like a triangle. The skin is slung between them, a leg stretched out to each reed. A woman, seated on the ground, pushes and swings it, and presently the butter is churned. This is the simple imitation of what accident first taught; and in the desert the butter is, to this day, churned by the camel, not by the dairy-maid.[156]The variety of its forms is wonderful. Itsours, itferments, it becomessugar—it may be distilled intoalcohol. It changes tocurd; it becomescheese; it hardens tostone,[157]or acquires the tenacity ofcement;[158]it leavens intoyourt; it dries intopaste;[159]it is separated by heat intocaimah; by greater heat intogee; by repose it gives youcream, by agitationbutter.The peculiarity of the compound resides in the mode of mixture of the oil and water. These are not chemically united, for the oil is obtained without a reagent. Globules, as in the blood, have been detected. These by agitation cohere, probably by atomic polarity. Heat causes oil to appear, by bursting them. This is the difference between gee and butter. The globules being congested in a granular state, in butter and cheese, these when melted cannot be restored, like wax or lard, to their original condition. The cases of these globules are the part contributed by the animal; and, generated in the udder, must be the caseine, which is acted upon by the rennet, and becomes curd. However, as these compounds are not to be imitated by art, so have they not been as yet explained by science.From this diet of milk has sprung the invention of butter. In the Zahara the animals are milked once a-day. All the kinds of milk are poured in together, and the distribution is made round and round to a family in the same cup or bowl. This is the whole meal.[160]What remains over is left for the old men, and poured into a skin, and put on the camel’s back, that it may be given to them at the next encampment. On their arrival it is churned, and thus butter becomes their perquisite, and is forbidden fruit to the younger portion of the community.There is no mention of butter in Homer. Herodotus[161]and Hippocrates mention it as a Scythian word. But it is not satisfactory to me that butter is meant. The most particular description is by Hippocrates.[162]He introduces it as an analogy, to show the effect of disturbance on the humours of the body. He makes in that case the bile, as the lightest, rise to the top; the blood remains in the middle, and the phlegm falls below, just as the Scythians, by agitating mare’s milk, get three substances-theβούτηρον, on the top, theὀῤῥὸς, in the middle, and theἵππακα, at the bottom. Milk is never so treated, and produces no such substances. We accept the description, because of the manner of treating it, which resembles churnin and the word butter. That butter should have been used among the primitive Scythians, while yet pastoral, would concur with what we see elsewhere, but it is not proved by the passages in question. The word butter may have been known to the Greeks, as used by some barbarians, and therefore used for all oily preparations from milk, on this occasion. The agitation, or churning, is the chief link; but this again becomes very slight, when we know that the Tartars to this day employ that process in preparing milk for distillation,[163]and get from it their kermis.In the domestic economy of the Zahara, milk assumes an importance which to us is scarcely credible. Periodically throughout that vast region—and among some of its tribes constantly—[164]it constitutes the sole and entire food of the population. “Impossible!” the animal chemist will exclaim. “Man requires a pound of nutriment; milk contains seven per cent., or say one ounce to the pound. He would have to drink sixteen pounds of milk, that is, two gallons, for the supply of mere waste of muscle. But milk does not supply the chemical ingredients for the animal laboratory. We want carbon for the great furnace of the lungs to supply heat and life.” I can only allege the fact. I have myself lived for months almost entirely on milk, curds, and cheese, and have not found the animal heat decay. On this diet the frame is able to support labour and privation, and to last long.If we are to credit a fraction of the tales that are told of the age to which the Galactofagi attain, we should have to set it down as the perfection of food.[165]Nor are the effects of this diet confined to our species: milk is provender for cattle. It is given to horses where grain cannot be procured, and, together with dates, is the ordinary food of those fabulous steeds, the “Breath of the Desert.”Milk contains nothing that is superfluous, to impose toil on the digestive organs, or to produce disturbance in the animal laboratory. It is, properly, neither an animal nor a vegetable substance. It is not dead flesh, of which we make our stomachs the sepulchre; nor is it the cold vegetation of the earth, for the decomposition of which we make them a trough. It is generated in the body of one animal, in order to be adapted for the food of another. It is drawn from the blood, and undergoes a change, which brings it near to chyle, so as to fit it to pass readily again into blood.[166]It is a food prepared, and a dish cooked, by Nature’s own hand, and served, if not hot, warm. It is adapted to the stomach before it can bear anything else, being the first transition from the blood circulated into the animal without the intervention of its own organs, and conveying into the body all that is requisite for its growth and development.[167]Like death, it equalises all ranks, all races, nay, even brings to the same level different orders of creation. It is the only food which the prince and the beggar, the tiger and the lamb, the Jew and Gentile, have in common; and, in common with other special favours, of which we are the objects, we least appreciate where we are most indebted.Men may accustom themselves to a fetid atmosphere, and even to poisonous food, and they are then unable to appreciate what they lose, or what they suffer; but the simplest pabulum must best serve the purposes of life, and in proportion as any other is substituted, must there be a dissipation of vital power, and a consequent curtailment of existence;[168]and thus it is that, amongst the Koords and Zaharans life is sustained by an amount of nutriment which, according to our calculations of expenditure and waste, is wholly insufficient. No nation understands so little the use of milk as the English. To one familiar with the cookery and diet of other countries, nothing can be more afflicting than to visit the abodes, and inspect the food of those classes amongst ourselves who cannot afford meat. The fashion of tea, and the mania for baker’s bread, have expelled popular knowledge in the culinary art, together with the use of this natural diet, which is also proportionally diminished by the enclosure of commons, the methods of agriculture, and the disuse of ewes’ milk, even when the number of flocks increase.Pliny derives the Latin word from the Greekβόοςτύρα, without explaining how butter could ever come to be called cows’ cheese, or observing that mares, not cows, furnished it. What he tells us of butter refers to “the barbarians, who,” he says, “use it instead of oil, to anoint their children, and hold it to be the daintiest of meats. It is forbidden to the inferior classes; they employ it as a medicine, and esteem it the more, the stronger (more rancid) it is.” The two latter points exactly coincide with the practice in Africa. For higher classes, read old men. They use butter medicinally, and for that purpose keep it till it becomes rancid. The commentators, however, would amend Pliny by substitutingminusformajus! The Roman naturalist in all he says refers to oiled butter or gee, and not to butter produced by agitation or churning. He is astonished that the barbarians possessing butter are ignorant of cheese; but is by no means surprised at his own countrymen, who, liking milk and cheese, could neither make butter nor adopt it. The wordscheeseandbutter, supposed to be derived from the Latin, were, as will presently appear, derived by the Romans from the barbarians.Butter is mentioned in the Old Testament. The commentators, however, are agreed that it is a mistranslation. I admit that it does militate against its antiquity that it should be so seldom mentioned there. The imagery of the Scriptures is drawn from the most homely objects. The worthies of Israel were as good cooks as Crœsus or Patroclus; the high-priests were butchers by profession; and all the prophets did not live on locusts and wild honey;—probably there was not one who had not used the basting ladle. If, therefore, they had possessed that delicate and valuable substance, with which we have become too familiar for its just appreciation, is it possible that it should occur but eight times from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New?The explanation is furnished in the aversion of the Jew to butter, to which I have already adverted. The same distinction between the Jew and the Philistine, no doubt, held in the time of David.The Jews interpret the injunction “Thou shalt not seethe the kid in the mother’s milk,” to mean, that butter be not mixed with meat;[169]consequently they do not allow it to touch any pan, dish, platter, knife, spoon, or dresser used for their ordinary food. “Antagonism” being thus established between butter and their common diet, butter does not make “progression,” nor even hold its own. It is to be inferred, that the butter they knew contained,—in part at least,—the milk of goats, as would be the case in the Zahara method of churning.It is first mentioned when Abraham entertains the angels. He took “butter and milk, and the calf he had dressed.”[170]Four centuries later, we have “Rivers of honey and butter;”[171]and butter compared with oil for “washing one’s steps.”[172]It then occurs in Moses’s song: “Butterofkine,milkofsheep, andfatof lambs.” It next appears in Deborah’s and Barak’s song: “He asked for water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.”[173]It is brought for David when he is fleeing from Absalom.[174]The wise man speaks of it as a wise man ought: “Thechurningof milk bringeth forth butter.”[175]The last mention is the most remarkable; it is Isaiah’s prophecy respecting Christ: “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse evil and choose good.” The word translated butter isimae,[176]which Calmet explains as “the scalded cream in use in the East.” Gesenius says, “Butter by the ancients, as well as by the orientals, was only used medically.” By others it is interpreted “curdled milk,” “cheese,” &c. In a word, the commentators have been as much put out by Jewish butter as the scholiast by Phœnician bread. Had curds or sour milk been meant, the proper name would have been given. Had Calmet known anything of the scalded cream “in use in the East,” he never could have supposed that it would be employed to wash with. None of these could be obtained bychurning. Then it is answered, that the Jews had no churn. There is no such word in Hebrew: the passage of Solomon is, “As thechurningof milk bringeth forth butter, so doth thewringingof the nose bring forth blood, and thestirring upof wrath bring forth strife.” The same word is employed throughout—mitz. But the word which could be translated “churning,” “wringing,” and “stirring up,” seems most happily adapted to describe the jerk and swing of the skin full of liquid on the camel’s back, or the process by which it was imitated.In none of these passages, save the last, is butter spoken of as in use among Jews after the promulgation of the Ceremonial Law. Abraham and Job are anterior, so is the period to which Moses refers when he speaks of the good things which they had abused, and thereby incurred God’s displeasure. When brought forth in a “lordly dish,” it was by a Midianite offered to a Hazorite.[177]There was much conveyed to the Israelite in the epithet given to a dish in which butter could never be placed by him. When brought to David it is offered indeed to a Hebrew under the Ceremonial Law, but it might be for the Pelethites or Cerethian, who accompanied him; it is presented too by “one of the children of Ammon.” Solomon might be describing the practice of the neighbouring Arabs or Canaanites. In both the cases in which it is mentioned by Isaiah (ch. vii.), viz., that Christ shall eat it, and that the people shall be reduced to eat it, no reference is made to a present practice, and in both cases the sense of breaking the law may be conveyed.The Old Testament thus entirely establishes the present usage of Morocco, and its identity with Palestine. There, as here, butter was made, and then, as now, the Philistine fried his muffins in butter, the Jew in oil.One of the forms in which milk is most generally used, and of all, perhaps, the most healthful and agreeable, is unknown in Europe, and has no name amongst us: it is a curd (yumed) without rennet. It is used fresh, but may be drained of its whey and kept a considerable time. In travelling, it is hung in a bag, and, when very dry, rubbed down with fresh milk or water. This is theleben[178]of the Arabs and theyourt[179]of the Turks: it is also made in India, and calledtyre. It is made as follows:—the milk is heated to the point of boiling, and then allowed to cool down until the finger can be kept in it while you count three: a spoonful of the old yourt, mixed first with a little of the milk, is then poured in. It is put in a warm place (the temperature must not be under 70°), and in two or three hours it will have set. The process is one of fermentation: the milk is leavened. The first leaven of yourt, they say, was brought by Gabriel to Abraham. They, however, profess to be able to make it anew by repeating the above process during a fortnight, using on the first occasion a crab pounded in vinegar, or a silver spoon or button: I have succeeded in obtaining it without either the crab or the spoon. Milk after being brought to the boiling point, was allowed to sour; a spoonful of it was mixed on the second day, that again on the third, and so on till the fourteenth, when perfect yourt was obtained.When staying at Lamlin in Hungary, I used to have yourt sent over from Belgrade: the Germans were very glad to get it, but had no idea of making it for themselves. So travellers from all countries of Europe have become acquainted with it, and learn its value as an economical food and its qualities as a healthy diet. Most of them like it, some of them give it the preference over everything else; yet no one has thought of introducing it at home. In Greece, before and during the revolution, it was, like baths, common use. “Civilization” came, and a wholesome food and a healthful practice were straightway expelled.This species of curd, without the aid of the liquid found in the rennet of young animals, offers the explanation of practices of the Greeks, and suggests the possibility of unknown uses even of milk. The Greeks had cheese—or substances to which they applied that name—not made with rennet, and of which the description applies equally to yourt.[180]Their name for cheese,τυρὸς, is supposed to be derived from Tyre: the Indian name foryourtistyre. The Hindoos would not touch anything prepared with rennet. The Greeks made curd by vinegar,[181]pepper, burnt salt, the flowers of bastard saffron, and the threads on the head of the artichoke.[182]Next to yourt comescaïmac: it is not, however, to us equally a stranger. The first day I spent in Devonshire was occupied in a discussion respecting the Phœnician settlements. It was maintained by several learned natives that of these there was nodirectproof. The next morning, walking with one of these gentlemen, we entered a cottage. “There,” I said, pointing to the fire, upon which some Devonshire cream was preparing, “is what you wanted last night.” There was an Eastern dish made in an Eastern manner—the earthenware pots and wood-fires:[183]the cottage was built oftapia. The name of the adjoining village wasTorr; direct proof why every second name is Hebrew. Besides the village there isTorquay,Torbay,TorAbbey. To the eastward there isSudbury; and, if that name be not derived from the ancient metropolis of Phœnicia, no one will dispute the derivation ofMarazion(Great Zion) from the Jewish metropolis.Beer-Ferrers andBeerAlsten are Hebrew for the Well of Ferrers, the Well of Alsten. Then there is theMenarrock, the riverCamel, and so many more.[184]Sir Richard Carew describes, in his day, mattings for hangingupon the walls:[185]they are precisely so used in Barbary. The Moorish house is the fac-simile of that of ancient Judæa; we may expect, then, to find a Phœnician dish in villages which retain Phœnician names, and are built according to the Phœnician fashion, and were covered, as late as the seventeenth century, with Phœnician matting.Devonshire cream is made by heating the milk in a pan upon the fire, then allowing it to stand; the creamy and caseous parts collect on the top, and the watery part is drained off below. It may then be churned into butter: the “scalded cream of the East” is made by a similar process. The milk is poured into small shallow earthenware basins, which are put in the oven with a slow heat: the lighter part rises, and crusts. Gradually it hardens and thickens, until, by gathering up the whole substance, it forms a little dome. It is then lifted off like a cake, and a little colourless fluid remains at the bottom. This cream derives its name from the process of making it,caïmac, which meansburnt.[186]“Cream” has in Latin the same meaning: it could not, therefore, have been originally applied as at present, and the first cream the European nations who employed the word had seen must have been “burnt;”—that is, caïmac. It was probably invented during the Crusades. All the nations of Europe use this word. It follows, that none of them could originally have had it; for, in that case, they would have had an original one. Spain is, however, an exception: the Spaniards did not take part in the Crusades.Professor Ritter has made use of this art in tracing the ancient Scythians, and W. Von Humboldt has in like manner employed it in his remarkable work on the Basques. This is high tribute to the value of cookery in the profoundest inquiries; but the results show that, before it can be safely or successfully employed, philosophers must be cooks. Ritter confounds cheese and butter;[187]assumes, on the strength of the passage of Hippocrates,[188]on which I have above commented, butter to be a Scythian name, and butter to have been made by the Scythians. He then connects the Scythian compound from mares’ milk with the butter used as a medicine in Greece, which we know was made from cows’ milk, and the source of which I have already given. He does not trace any of the parallel words, or show a Scytho-German origin for “cream,” “milk,” “cheese,” &c.Humboldt considers his case to be fully made out, and says that the same thing holds with the Iberians;[189]but, as to whether we are to infer that the Iberians were Scythians or Germans, he does not explain. He refers to no one term in use, or to any practice. We have seen that cream has no native name in any European dialect; that the name for butter in every land expresses gee, not churned butter; and the same thing holds even of the Tartars and Chinese, who, like the Slaavs, call it “cows’ oil.” The Spanish peninsula is an exception, and exhibits, not only one, but two systems of its own.The Spanish has original words for cream and butter; the first isnata,[190]the secondmanteca. Manteca means also fat, so that it could not have been with them primitive: they do not use it now, save as an imported habit.In the Basque provinces it is indigenous, as among the tribes of the Zahara, and for the dairy, in all its branches, they have original terms: milk iseznea, butterguria, and creambicaño. These terms are wholly distinct from Aramean, Greek, Scythian, German, or Celt. Between the north and south of the peninsula the difference in practice coincides with the difference of its terms; and both prove that two distinct people anciently inhabited it. It was next to impossible that such primitive terms should have been lost. The things were unknown to the Romans, and the words introduced to supplant them were not Roman. (Natais an adaptation of the Latinnatare.) More is not wanted to confirm the statement of Strabo, that the “Hispanirestrict the termIberiato the portion bounded by the river Iber.” The two races were Hispani and Iberi.Connected with this subject is another peculiarity worth mentioning. The Greeks had two names for bread; the one the vulgar name, which I have already traced to the Brebers, and which is preserved in the modern dialect of Greece and of Andalusia, inψῶμιandacemite. The other isartos(ἄρτος). Now this word is pure Basque, and is found in a variety of compounds in their tongue. They have two words for bread,artoaandoguia: the first at present applied to maize, the second to barley; but the first is the primitive, being derived from “grinding with a stone;”[191]and as supplying the word for “dough,”artaoria(orea, mass). They haveartochiquia,artopellafor different preparations of flour. Now it may be asked, could the Greeks derive so primitive a word as “bread” from the Basques?[192]The explanation is given, by Socrates: “The Greeks had many words from the barbarians who werebefore them;” and the Basques were not always confined to the north of Spain. We know that they colonized Sicily, and traces of the language are to be found on the shores of the Euxine.The settlement of the Celts in Italy was coeval with Rome. If they had known cream and used butter, the Romans must have had them: their ornaments, their bedding, the square and lozenge patterns, their soap, &c., are known to us. The words and usages are thus not to be considered as belonging to their common race, but as derived from the incidents of their own adventures.In Gaelic, or more properlyErse,[193]the word for butter comes nearer to that of the Old Testament than the word employed by the Moors and Jews in Barbary. It isfin: in the genitive case it is the same as the Hebrew,fine. They have a second word which approaches equally to the Semetic gee. It isce. This appears to be the oiled butter which has now fallen into disuse.[194]Like the ancients they used it medicinally, and kept it till it was rancid. This is the third kind of butter known; and they have a third name,butter. This word they got where they gotfinandce. The medicinal use of butter has in these days been reduced to one spot of Africa—that is, Suz; and thence a traffic in it is carried on to Negroland, just as formerly it must have been exported from the whole coast of Barbary to Europe. This preparation is known to-day in the interior of Africa—precisely in the region where neither European nor Roman, nor Greek, could have spread it—asBudra. The word is given, and the substance described, in Jackson’s Vocabulary of the Shelloh dialect.I have already shown that Pliny did not know whence the Romans had the word, and they never had the thing. The clans derived it directly from Barbary or Judæa hundreds of years before Pliny wrote. I need not here repeat what I have elsewhere said regarding the transposition of cognate letters.DandTare such. In adding, according to the Greek and Roman fashion, their termination, they would for euphony say, Butyron for Budron.Cheese in Erse, isCaise,[195]pronounced Caishee. This, too, is supposed to come from the Romans, and the probability of this derivation is increased by Pliny’s statement, that the barbarians had no cheese; but we know that the Greeks had their cheese from the Phœnicians, since the wordτύρονis explained at least, as Tyrian. Phrygia exported even cheese of asses’ milk.[196]The old Arabs had a cheese of goats’ milk, not learnt from the Romans, for it had another name,Raïb. It is clear, then, that the Semetic races did not know the use of cheese, though, perhaps, as at present, they were not partial to it, and did not excel in making it. In the interior of Africa they do make cheese, and in the dialect of the great interior tribe extending from Morocco to the Red Sea, the name isagees. It is given in the French and Breber dictionaries.[197]The nearest approach the Romans could have made to agees would beacaseus: their word iscaseus. There is no need of the intervention of Rome to bring caise to the Celtic tribes.In respect to the manufacture of butter by the clans;—even without the aid of etymology we must carry it to times long antecedent to its use in Europe. It is associated with their superstitions[198]—that is, their mythological era. They make it by the process still in use in Barbary from the whole milk,[199]as well as by that now employed in the north of Europe, from cream thrown up cold. They eat it mixed with sweetmeats and honey; and this practice is no less peculiar still in some parts of the East than in the Highlands.[200]Preserves may be traced back to the immediate progeny of Abraham. Jacob sends down to Egypt a present for Joseph. It is the choice things of the land, of course, and things not common in Egypt. The first is balm, the second honey;[201]but honey could be no rarity in Egypt. The word in Hebrew isdipsi. That is the name still in use for preserves made of grapes; and in Shaw’s time, the village of Hebron alone exported annually three hundred camel loads of it to Egypt.[202]There being no grapes in the Highlands, the clans took to other fruit, not forgetting the oranges they had been accustomed to in Spain. Butter—that I mean in present use—being a preparation of cream, and cream being, as I have shown, of very recent invention, and not yet traced to its source; the principal evidence of the originality of butter among the clans, must rest on the proof of their having been in possession of cream, and this, I think, I can establish most satisfactorily. I have said that the word cream is not known to them. Now, they have for it two rare names:hachdar, which, like the nata of the Spaniards, means the “part that swims,” andbarr, which signifies “top.” Skimmed milk they callbainne lòm, or milk “bare” or “naked;” they have also a term for “milk under cream,” which isbainne ce, orbainne fo che. It is impossible that so many, so comprehensive, and such descriptive terms, all of them ancient, should have been in use, if the substance to which they apply was not known, and if the invention had not been original. And this is remarkable, that while the names of the preparations in use in Judæa may etymologically be traced to domestic tongues, all the names for this one, which is not to be found in the east, are pure Celtic. Cream is a constituent part of the national food, and is so general, that the very dishes of the dinner-service have been modified to suit it. Dessert plates are like small soup plates, as it is the necessary accompaniment of every sweet dish.They have the Eastern caïmac in the shape of Devonshire cream. It is known as “Carstorphine cream,” but it is going out of use. In the village which has given to it its Lowland name, it is no longer to be found, although the last generation of Edinburgh citizens used to repair thither on festal days to regale themselves all unconsciously on this Phœnician dainty.[203]In Turkey neither of the Semetic words for butter has been adopted: they have an original one,—like the mantica of the Spaniards. It isyagh. It applies equally to butter, fat, and oil; the last they callzeïtin yaga, “olive-butter;” and butter they sometimes qualify byjost, or “milk-butter.” They, therefore, had none of their own; but I refer to their word from a singular coincidence with the Erse, in which language “tallow” isigh. It is at present pronouncedce, but the orthography is a record of a more ancient pronunciation. The great Sclavonic family is in like manner without a word for butter. They call it oil.[204]The last point of identification with the East which I shall adduce, is the name of the substance which is the basis of all these compounds—milk. In Erse, it isbainne; in Arabic,chaleb. Here are not two consonants the same; to the ear there is no trace of resemblance, yet they are from one root, from which also comegala,[205]lac, andmilk. Bainne is derived from the Gaelic,ban, white.Lebanon(without the Greek terminationLe ban), is known to have been so called from its colour, white. Leben is sour milk in Arabic, and from the same root as chaleb.The clans are indebted to no one for their cheese; for their name for coagulated milk is derived from themaw, in which the rennet is found. It is calleda bhinnbeach. The stomach, or rennet, isbinid. They have a variety of other dishes[206]and names—[207]so extensive, indeed, as to lead to the inference that at some time they must have been essentially, if not like the tribes of the Zahara exclusively, pastoral, and restricted for their food to the produce of the dairy.The Highlanders have the greatest variety of dishes made from milk. They have the richest dairy, and the richest vocabulary: the words are partly derivative, partly original, as might have been expected from a practical and pastoral people, taking service amongst the different nations with whom these preparations were in use. They learned the usages of each, and retained them, with their names, so that the usages and the words show the Highlanders to have been in communication with the people who had Turkishcaïmac, Hindoogee, and Moorishsimin;—in other words, that they had been in the Holy Land before Phœnician usages had been extinguished, or, that when they were in Morocco the present habits were to be found.“It often happens, that in seeking for the origin of a word a much wider field of inquiry opens, and if carefully pursued, leads to unexpected conclusions, bearing on the history, belief, manners, and customs of primitive times, and so as to leave no doubt of the occurrence of particular events, or of the existence of peculiar customs, respecting which history is entirely silent, and of the falsity of other things, handed down undoubtingly in her pages. Etymology is the history of the languages of nations, which is a most important part of their general history. It is the lamp by which that which is obscure in the primitive history of the world will one day be lighted up.”[208]It is, indeed, the lamp, but not the light. The wick must be touched by living flame before it ignites. That flame is custom. The pursuit of mere sound—the affinities of roots—are but landscapes in the clouds, until you get things substantial, with which they are associated, and on which the light of etymology may be brought to shine.A distinction between the use of butter and oil for simmering muffins and crumpets in Morocco, furnishes a link between those eaten in the Temple of Solomon and those sold in the streets of London, and thereby supplies evidence to fix the Cassiterides, while incidentally, it disposes of a great historical and ethnographic question, the wanderings of the Celts.An admirable product has been used for thousands of years in this region, and no Jason has come to carry it away. Yet Julius Cæsar and Count Julian, Sartorius, and Belisarius, CharlesV,, with many other shrewd persons, have tasted Moorish butter. The Andalusians are delighted to get a little pot of it, but as to learning how to make it, that never entered into their philosophy. So yourt, made in every tent or hut, from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic, is unknown in Europe. A magic line defines the domain of chops, of boiled potatoes, of chocolate, of coffee. One race can boil, another cannot:e.g.the English.[209]One race can roast, another cannot; and each is utterly incapable of comprehending the faculty conferred on the other. There is a land congenial to pilaff, another to kuskoussou, another to mutton-broth. Devonshire cream, polecuta, poi curry, have, like an insect on a moss, their zone. You may transplant trees, and transfer royal houses, carry forth religions, and distribute all around slips of constitutions—but a dish!—no!—as there is more in a costume than covering the back, so is there more in a dish than filling the belly.There yet remains one term unexamined. Whence comesdairy? There is no such word on the Continent; it is neither Latin nor Teutonic. It has no Celtic root. I have been describing the douar, which is indeed a camp; but the features which forced themselves upon my attention belonged to the sheepfold. The people are shepherds. In every tent the chief utensils are the milk-pails, leathern churns, and butter-pots; the chief produce and food, milk and butter. Why is the Arab camp a circle? It is to fold the cattle. Thence the name, douar and deïra. The exploits of Abd-el-Kadir and hisDeïrahave made the word familiar to us in Europe. It is the very word we apply to the fold’s produce.[210]From the same root isgadeira,gadir, an enclosure—the name of Cadiz, the only city upon earth in which the cow or ewe is not to be found, nor any animal whatever giving milk! How, it may be asked, could the word come to us?Tally ho!is in English an unmeaning word. The rallying cry of the Arab in war isTalla hu!Tally ho! doubtless, was brought by the Crusaders. Dairy may have been learnt then, or many a century before.The pursuit of a word is like “hunt the slipper.” It is here, it is there. There would be no game unless it were slipped under. There wasBabia, the goddess of infants, in Phœnicia; there arebabiesin England. No doubt it is the same slipper, though we cannot tell under what petticoat it has slipped.Sheeps’ heads, with the skin left on, are in Morocco, as in Scotland, carried to the smithy to be singed. “Singed heads” were never twice invented in the world.[211]Things that are worth anything, are only invented once. The crop is sown, the weeds only come up of themselves. There is nothing without its history, if we only knew it. Whatever is, had a beginning. That only is worth looking for which we do not know.[118]See “History of Civilization,” passim.[119]The Americans call crumpets muffins, so that the latter must have been the common name at the time of the early emigration westward.[120]In the culinary language of our country, I use this term to supply the place of “plat,” and “met.”[121]Africa,vol. ii. p.4.[122]Poll. Onomastlib. vi.74.[123]Ὁ δὲ σιτοποιὸς χειρίδας ἔχων καὶ περὶ τῷ στόματι κημὸν ἔτριβε τὸ σταὶς ἵνα μηδὲ ἱδρὼς ἐπιῤῥέῃ, μήτε τοῖς φυράμασιν ὁ τρίβων ἔπνέοι.—Athen., lib. xii.70.[124]Athen. lib. iii.77; Idem,lib. xiv.54; Poll.lib. vi.32; Idem,lib. vi.75; Schol. Aristoph. Archar. 86.[125]Rabbi Solomon translates it “wafer.”[126]Abdul-melich asked the old Mechyumian, what meat he liked best; he answered, an ass’s neck well seasoned and well roasted. “What say you,” says Abdul-melich, “to a leg or shoulder of a sucking lamb, well roasted and covered over with milk and butter?” Abulpheda remarks on this passage, “the Arabians had not then changed their cookery from what it was in the time of Abraham.”[127]The Crusader, Baldwin, is known to the Arabs as Barduil. Portugal they make Portgun. Labunitus of Homer, is written Nabunitus by Berosius. The exchange ofbandmis so common, as almost to be a rule; and thence, perhaps, that strange word biffin for baked apples, resembling in shape the muffin.Mr. Layard mentions, that the Yezidis, who abhor all imprecations, will not use the wordnaal, “horse-shoe,” because it approaches tolaana “curse.”—Nineveh,vol. i. p.296.[128]The Dutch have one of the best sweet dishes, which they peculiarly honour by decorated booths at their fairs, set apart for its preparation. Like the muffin, it is flour and water set for three hours to ferment: it is then poured, not on a griddle, but on heated tongs with deep bars, so that it comes out with the shape of a portcullis; it is then eaten like the sfen, with sugar or honey.[129]The Turks call the muffinGassi Cadaëf. This is also run on the griddle through a tin mould with holes, and so forms coils of thread like vermicelli. This is calledTel(wire)Cadaëf. These dainties are described in a Turkish cookery book; Genek Rizalisè, by Negib Effendi,A.H.1259,A.D.1842.[130]The English roll out the dough and then put dabs of butter on it, and then roll it again. The fee for learning to make flake-pastry, as described above, is five guineas.[131]They also use rice for the same purpose, reducing it by boiling. The pastry prepared from it is calledkuladj.[132]The round copper dish in use in the East, and which is carried hot from the fire and placed on thesofra, or table, theτήγανονof the Greeks.[133]Khalil Dhaheri mentions it also. The passage is quoted by Volney, and he translates itindigo. May there not be some connexion between the Egyptian name, and the old goddess Neith, and also with the English wordknead?[134]Nouv. Missions, t. ii. p.73.[135]On making inquiries respecting it, I have received the following reply from Cirencester.

The day we landed at Rabat we heard a little tinkling bell through the street, just like the four o’clock muffin-bell in London. One of the party asked if it were tea-time amongst the Moors, and the others laughed, thinking it a good joke:—there was no joke in the case. These cockney cakes are just as common here as within the sound of Bow bells, and served for breakfast in Barbary when Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honour had for theirs beefsteaks and ale, or herrings and bread and cheese. They are a little larger than those in London, and exactly thepeikletsof the midland counties.

To find muffins and crumpets here is, indeed, in the language of modern philosophy, a “great and a twofold fact.”[118]It is, however, one which great men have overlooked; because, although a cook must be a philosopher, it is not required that a philosopher should be a cook.

The incident set me upon considering the nature of the muffin, and opened to me a large field of speculation, culinary and historical. I first perceived that there were combined in the greasy accompaniment of our tea-tables characters so diverse, that it must have a history, and an eventful one; that it must have undergone vicissitude and persecution in the course of its wide career, the range of which in space and time could not be doubtful, from the place in which I found it.

Let me dispose first of the wordcrumpet: it is clearly a recent one. Peiklet is still used in the interior of England, and one name is given to both by Moors and Jews,sfen; I shall, therefore, equally employ for both the word “muffin.”[119]

The muffin isbread,cake, anddish:[120]like the first, it is fermented; like the second, baked or toasted on a griddle; like the third, it requires to be cooked before it is eaten. Our method of cooking, by toasting first and then softening by butter, appears at the first glance the travestie of some lost method. The use of the toasting-fork could not have preceded coal-fires and grates with upright bars, an invention not earlier than the Georges; nor could it have preceded the use of butter, which cannot be traced beyond the Dutch stadtholder. In America, they do not toast and butter muffins, but eat them hot, as baked. They were, therefore, originally a part of the regular cookery of the country, and, indeed, could not belong, as at present, to “breakfast” and “tea,” which meals are of recent invention. Morocco presents the original practice: here they are simmered in oil or butter, and then dipped in honey. I did not see them used in dressed dishes; but Marmol, writing two centuries ago, describes them as employed in this manner. He says, “In Morocco, there are two ways of making bread—baking in an oven, as we do in Europe, and preparing it in pans to be eaten hot with honey and butter, or with oil. These cakes are sometimes stewed with the flesh of goats, for that of sheep is difficult to be got at, and that of cattle they do not consider wholesome.”[121]

The Moors and the Jews cook them differently, the former using butter, the latter oil: they thus connect baking and cooking, and illustrate differences between Judaism and Islam, or, perhaps, between Jew and Gentile. With these data it may be worth while to endeavour to find traces of them in ancient times.

Baking in Greece had attained to the highest perfection, as exhibited in separating or bolling the flour,[122]and in kneading the dough.[123]The art of baking, as connected with religious festivals, possessed an importance which, to us, is inconceivable. Among the Greek states, Athens was most distinguished for its bread; yet there were there foreign bakers—and these Lydians.[124]There was bread known by the name of Cappadocian, and the Phœnicians were held bakers of first repute. This people was said to possess as many kinds of bread as there were days in the year: their merit, however, does not seem to have consisted in baking, properly so called, but in combining preparations of flour with other viands; and in the Old Testament we have constant references to the mixtures of flour with oil and honey, all which approach to the Moorish sfen.

The names of only three out of the three hundred and sixty-five kinds of Phœnician bread have been handed down: the three resemble one another. This must have been the kind of bread for which Phœnicia was celebrated, and the descriptions apply to the muffin and the sfen, still preserved in countries which they colonized. The three kinds arelackmar,chebrodlapson, andmaphula: lackmar is evidently derived from lackma, to swallow (whencelick), and must have been remarkably soft. Athenæus calls it“ἄρτον ἁπαλόν.”It was prepared with milk and oil: the Syrians were celebrated for making it. That it was known to the Jews is proved by the wordlachmanigoth, which occurs in the Talmud.[125]It was known to the Arabs, and is described by Mininski as a fritter of flour, dried grapes, oil, and fresh wine: of chebrodlapson, we only know that it was prepared with honey. How these were baked is not stated; but the third, maphula, was not fired in the oven, but on the hearth, or on a griddle. In the three collectively, we have all the ingredients and the methods at present in use in Morocco,[126]viz. flour, milk, oil, honey, and a griddle for firing them.

In maphula, we have the word employed in England. Taking away the final vowel added by the Greeks, and changinglfor its cognaten, maphula or mufula becomes mufun.[127]

These names have puzzled the most learned. Bochart avows his perplexity; Casaubon avers that “we ought not to be ashamed of confessing our ignorance of what we do not know, and,ipso facto, confesses his own.” Their difficulties disappear, as usual, before the knowledge of habits. Flour, milk, oil, and honey mixed up together would, indeed, form a sorry dish; as the critics, not being cooks, could not devise the process by which they could be converted into a palatable one. Bochart, with his usual sagacity, has detected the union of cooking and baking, and also that the Jews and Arabs cooked the muffin differently. He has, however, mistaken the distinction; he makes the Jews use oilorbutter, the Arabs fat: the Jews cook it in oil only, the Arabs prefer butter.

The griddle on which muffins are baked in London,[128]is precisely the same as that used in the East, and fixed in the same manner over the fire. It serves for a variety of other dishes and preparations of flour.[129]On it is made the pastry of the East, which all travellers have tasted, which many have pronounced exquisite, and yet which none have described, or suspected, perhaps, to be different from that of Europe.

The secret of French pastry consists in bringing the butter and the dough to exactly the same consistency: this is effected by temperature for the butter, by water for the dough, cooling down the one or softening the other. When so adjusted, the butter in one mass is covered in;[130]it then spreads under the rolling-pin equally as the dough spreads, each in its own plane. Folded over and over again, the two keep distinct, and thus are obtained the flakes.

The butter of the East is fluid, and runs like oil; how, then, can they have flake-pastry? It was this difficulty which spurred their invention, and produced the unrivalled method which I shall now describe.

Wheat is steeped till it sprouts; it is then rubbed down, or pounded in a mortar, till it acquires the consistency of cream. In this state it is poured in ladles on the griddle, rubbed with butter. Instantly hardening, it is tossed off, sheet after sheet: the name isyoufka.[131]It is then strung, and hung up: when wanted, a bundle of it is laid into the dish, ortaien,[132]for the under-crust; the contents, sweet or savoury, of the pastry, are then put in, and the upper-crust in the same manner laid on. By this process are attained, in the highest degree, all the objects of French pastry—fineness of flour with a certainagro dolceflavour, softness in the substance, fineness and equality in the flake. It has the advantage, also, over our pastry, of facility and economy of time.

Old Arabic writers mention two kinds of food prepared by makingKhebes, which are compared to the banana andNeïdehdescribed by Abd Allatib, as follows: “Wheat is soaked until it sprouts; it is then boiled until its whole substance passes into the water; the water is then clarified, and boiled down until it gets thick; at this point a little flour is thrown in, and it sets; it is then taken from the fire, and sold at the price of bread.” This isNeïdeh Albousch; but when no flour is added, and it is boiled until it coagulates, it is better and sells for a higher price, and is calledNeïdeh Makoudeh.[133]

Soyonti speaks of it as one of the things in high estimation in Egypt, and quotes an old writer, who says that it was discovered by the Virgin Mary. Being without milk, she was inspired with the idea of preparing it for the Infant Jesus. P. Sicard saw this dish at Meuschieh, and thus describes it: “The grain is steeped for several days till it sprouts; it is then dried, pounded or ground, and boiled for use. A sweet and agreeable confection is then made without sugar, and the people of the country esteem it much, and are very fond of it.”[134]In the time of Sonnini it had disappeared from Meuschieh. Here we have the steeping of the grain, the grinding, and the diluting of it in water, as in the present Eastern pastry. Although we have not the toasting of it on the griddle, more cannot be wanted to carry this process back to ancient times, and to those celebrated baker-cooks of Tyre and Sidon.

The neïdeh is still preserved in Britain under the name ofFrumentyorFurmity. The method of preparing it is now in the hands of a few persons only, and has become a secret; and, probably, in another generation it too will have died out, under the crushing roller of subdivision of labour. Where still used, it is only on one occasion in the year,Mid Lent Sunday. When brought to market it is of the consistence of thick gum. Those who have eaten it describe it as an excellent dish. The festival when it is used may have some connexion with the Arab tradition concerning Mary’s milk.[135]

In the Highlands there is at once the neïdeh, the cadaëf, and the youfka; not, however, by malting, but by fermentation. Oat seeds are steeped for ten days till they ferment, the water is then boiled till it thickens. This issowans;[136]or it is poured on the griddle and made intoscons,[137]which are used on festal occasions, but chiefly at Christmas.[138]That the Highlanders understood malting is shown in their whiskey, which they did not wait for Paracelsus to teach them to distil.

The first step in preparing flour or meal for food, is the ashes on the griddle; the next and last is, the oven. The peculiarity of bread resides in the baking in the oven; fermentation is called in as an auxiliary: the process is elaborate and complicated. When first invented, the oven and its produce, the baking and the bread, would be known by the same name. In early times words had to do severe duty. A soft flat roll, resembling the common bread of Barbary, is called in Scotland,bake. If so called because it is baked, it must have been so at the origin of baking. “Bake” would thus belong to the earliest ages, and go back to the first discovery of an oven, which, by one peculiar and horrid ceremony, we can trace to Sabæa.[139]

Now, this very word is written in a book two thousand three hundred years ago, and then as an old one—as one of the oldest in use among men.[140]There we learn that the Phrygian name for bread wasbake; bake was, therefore, asked for three thousand years ago, by Pelethite or Cerethian at Escalon or Gorja, just as to-day by the barefooted callant of Paisley or Linlithgow. It may be objected that the word, if in use in Canaan, would not have been mentioned as Phrygian; but the colony may have retained an ancient word which the metropolis had lost,[141]or the metropolis may, without losing the one, have introduced new names for new inventions. The Phœnician words which have been preserved are of that description. Lackmar, Chebrodlapson, are fine terms, such as would strike strangers more than the homely one in common use. The Egyptians, besides, were not given to travel; and with shoals of travellers and clouds of books, see how difficult—nay, impossible, it is to get at the simple things of any country.

However, “bake” and “muffin” do not stand alone: they are accompanied by a goodly array of emigrants from the Holy Land. I adduce them, not to prove any affinity of Hebrew and Celtic, or of Indo-Germanic and Semitic, but to establish the intercourse of our forefathers with those countries. Thus have come to uscake,[142]bun,[143]scon,[144]sowans,[145]bread,[146]broth,bear[147](old Teutonic for grain),beer,barley, and I may, perhaps, addham[148]andmeat,[149]which, with those given before, make a baker’s dozen.

I will now leave it to the antiquarian to determine whether sfen came hither with the “diggers” for tin, or with those later “Afers,” whose persons and wares increased in the eyes of William the Norman, as the author of “Harold” narrates, the attraction of the capital of England. But anyhow, this remains certain, that muffins and crumpets were served at Hiram’s table.

A stranger from Europe is little surprised to findbutterin Morocco. I had spent years in the East, and never had seen butter. I had myself introduced it both in Greece and Turkey; what, then, was my surprise to find it here. You may see in a boy’s hand a roll sliced—yes, sliced bread in a Mussulman’s hand, with a lump of butter inside for his breakfast, just as in England. It is pale, sweet, cowslip-flavoured, and smelling of the country[150]—I mean the country of England. To us butter comes so naturally—it is so necessary—that we cannot imagine ourselves without it, nor call up the difficulties in the way of its first discovery, which is one of the latest of uncivilized articles among the barbarous.

We read of butter in ancient times, but it wasgee. The merit of ours is its being made from cream thrown up cold. The milk of kine alone has that property; and that milk during many centuries was unknown to man as food.

The great event of primeval society was the employment of cattle in tillage. To preserve and increase the breed was the first care of legislators: this they effected by consecrating the cow,[151]and its milk was surrendered to its own offspring. The practice outlived the occasion; and it was not till horses came to be substituted for oxen in the flat lands of the north that cows’ milk returned into general use,[152]as it had originally been among nomade tribes. Cream was unknown to all antiquity. There is not even the word in any ancient language. This statement will appear extraordinary, and may, perhaps, be set down as contrary to reason and unfounded in fact, for reference to cream in so many authors will immediately recur. The fact is, that none of those who have illustrated ancient manners and language have noticed this point, and they and travellers have not been conversant with the dairy; consequently they have transferred their own ideas to the languages they translated, the usages they described, or even the very things before their eyes.[153]

Up to the time of this discovery the diet consisted, as in the East, of a repetition of the same meal twice in the day. The breakfast differed not from the dinner, except that it was a smaller meal—the dishes were the same. Butter revolutionized the kitchen. About the same time two remarkable adjuncts to our diet were introduced from China and Arabia, tea and coffee. In their native countries they were no part of the people’s food, and furnished forth no meal; they were only used as a slight refreshment. In our adaptation of them they lost their flavour,[154]and no longer served their original purpose. Our coarse preparation required to be mellowed by cream or milk, and sugar. With the aid of butter, they assumed the consistency of a refection, and with eggs, in the shell,[155]of a meal. This did not, however, suffice as a substitute for both meals. Beef ruled the evening repast: the road diverged; two distinct meals came into existence, and the “English breakfast” assumed its dignified station in the domestic world. It has spread far and near, but only where preceded by the discovery of cream, and accompanied by the manufacture of butter. Morocco having butter, has the two descriptions of meals.

They make their butter without churn or cream. A goat’s-skin, with the hairy side in, is filled two thirds with milk; four poles or reeds, six feet long, are set up like a triangle. The skin is slung between them, a leg stretched out to each reed. A woman, seated on the ground, pushes and swings it, and presently the butter is churned. This is the simple imitation of what accident first taught; and in the desert the butter is, to this day, churned by the camel, not by the dairy-maid.[156]

The variety of its forms is wonderful. Itsours, itferments, it becomessugar—it may be distilled intoalcohol. It changes tocurd; it becomescheese; it hardens tostone,[157]or acquires the tenacity ofcement;[158]it leavens intoyourt; it dries intopaste;[159]it is separated by heat intocaimah; by greater heat intogee; by repose it gives youcream, by agitationbutter.

The peculiarity of the compound resides in the mode of mixture of the oil and water. These are not chemically united, for the oil is obtained without a reagent. Globules, as in the blood, have been detected. These by agitation cohere, probably by atomic polarity. Heat causes oil to appear, by bursting them. This is the difference between gee and butter. The globules being congested in a granular state, in butter and cheese, these when melted cannot be restored, like wax or lard, to their original condition. The cases of these globules are the part contributed by the animal; and, generated in the udder, must be the caseine, which is acted upon by the rennet, and becomes curd. However, as these compounds are not to be imitated by art, so have they not been as yet explained by science.

From this diet of milk has sprung the invention of butter. In the Zahara the animals are milked once a-day. All the kinds of milk are poured in together, and the distribution is made round and round to a family in the same cup or bowl. This is the whole meal.[160]What remains over is left for the old men, and poured into a skin, and put on the camel’s back, that it may be given to them at the next encampment. On their arrival it is churned, and thus butter becomes their perquisite, and is forbidden fruit to the younger portion of the community.

There is no mention of butter in Homer. Herodotus[161]and Hippocrates mention it as a Scythian word. But it is not satisfactory to me that butter is meant. The most particular description is by Hippocrates.[162]He introduces it as an analogy, to show the effect of disturbance on the humours of the body. He makes in that case the bile, as the lightest, rise to the top; the blood remains in the middle, and the phlegm falls below, just as the Scythians, by agitating mare’s milk, get three substances-theβούτηρον, on the top, theὀῤῥὸς, in the middle, and theἵππακα, at the bottom. Milk is never so treated, and produces no such substances. We accept the description, because of the manner of treating it, which resembles churnin and the word butter. That butter should have been used among the primitive Scythians, while yet pastoral, would concur with what we see elsewhere, but it is not proved by the passages in question. The word butter may have been known to the Greeks, as used by some barbarians, and therefore used for all oily preparations from milk, on this occasion. The agitation, or churning, is the chief link; but this again becomes very slight, when we know that the Tartars to this day employ that process in preparing milk for distillation,[163]and get from it their kermis.

In the domestic economy of the Zahara, milk assumes an importance which to us is scarcely credible. Periodically throughout that vast region—and among some of its tribes constantly—[164]it constitutes the sole and entire food of the population. “Impossible!” the animal chemist will exclaim. “Man requires a pound of nutriment; milk contains seven per cent., or say one ounce to the pound. He would have to drink sixteen pounds of milk, that is, two gallons, for the supply of mere waste of muscle. But milk does not supply the chemical ingredients for the animal laboratory. We want carbon for the great furnace of the lungs to supply heat and life.” I can only allege the fact. I have myself lived for months almost entirely on milk, curds, and cheese, and have not found the animal heat decay. On this diet the frame is able to support labour and privation, and to last long.

If we are to credit a fraction of the tales that are told of the age to which the Galactofagi attain, we should have to set it down as the perfection of food.[165]Nor are the effects of this diet confined to our species: milk is provender for cattle. It is given to horses where grain cannot be procured, and, together with dates, is the ordinary food of those fabulous steeds, the “Breath of the Desert.”

Milk contains nothing that is superfluous, to impose toil on the digestive organs, or to produce disturbance in the animal laboratory. It is, properly, neither an animal nor a vegetable substance. It is not dead flesh, of which we make our stomachs the sepulchre; nor is it the cold vegetation of the earth, for the decomposition of which we make them a trough. It is generated in the body of one animal, in order to be adapted for the food of another. It is drawn from the blood, and undergoes a change, which brings it near to chyle, so as to fit it to pass readily again into blood.[166]It is a food prepared, and a dish cooked, by Nature’s own hand, and served, if not hot, warm. It is adapted to the stomach before it can bear anything else, being the first transition from the blood circulated into the animal without the intervention of its own organs, and conveying into the body all that is requisite for its growth and development.[167]Like death, it equalises all ranks, all races, nay, even brings to the same level different orders of creation. It is the only food which the prince and the beggar, the tiger and the lamb, the Jew and Gentile, have in common; and, in common with other special favours, of which we are the objects, we least appreciate where we are most indebted.

Men may accustom themselves to a fetid atmosphere, and even to poisonous food, and they are then unable to appreciate what they lose, or what they suffer; but the simplest pabulum must best serve the purposes of life, and in proportion as any other is substituted, must there be a dissipation of vital power, and a consequent curtailment of existence;[168]and thus it is that, amongst the Koords and Zaharans life is sustained by an amount of nutriment which, according to our calculations of expenditure and waste, is wholly insufficient. No nation understands so little the use of milk as the English. To one familiar with the cookery and diet of other countries, nothing can be more afflicting than to visit the abodes, and inspect the food of those classes amongst ourselves who cannot afford meat. The fashion of tea, and the mania for baker’s bread, have expelled popular knowledge in the culinary art, together with the use of this natural diet, which is also proportionally diminished by the enclosure of commons, the methods of agriculture, and the disuse of ewes’ milk, even when the number of flocks increase.

Pliny derives the Latin word from the Greekβόοςτύρα, without explaining how butter could ever come to be called cows’ cheese, or observing that mares, not cows, furnished it. What he tells us of butter refers to “the barbarians, who,” he says, “use it instead of oil, to anoint their children, and hold it to be the daintiest of meats. It is forbidden to the inferior classes; they employ it as a medicine, and esteem it the more, the stronger (more rancid) it is.” The two latter points exactly coincide with the practice in Africa. For higher classes, read old men. They use butter medicinally, and for that purpose keep it till it becomes rancid. The commentators, however, would amend Pliny by substitutingminusformajus! The Roman naturalist in all he says refers to oiled butter or gee, and not to butter produced by agitation or churning. He is astonished that the barbarians possessing butter are ignorant of cheese; but is by no means surprised at his own countrymen, who, liking milk and cheese, could neither make butter nor adopt it. The wordscheeseandbutter, supposed to be derived from the Latin, were, as will presently appear, derived by the Romans from the barbarians.

Butter is mentioned in the Old Testament. The commentators, however, are agreed that it is a mistranslation. I admit that it does militate against its antiquity that it should be so seldom mentioned there. The imagery of the Scriptures is drawn from the most homely objects. The worthies of Israel were as good cooks as Crœsus or Patroclus; the high-priests were butchers by profession; and all the prophets did not live on locusts and wild honey;—probably there was not one who had not used the basting ladle. If, therefore, they had possessed that delicate and valuable substance, with which we have become too familiar for its just appreciation, is it possible that it should occur but eight times from the beginning of the Old Testament to the end of the New?

The explanation is furnished in the aversion of the Jew to butter, to which I have already adverted. The same distinction between the Jew and the Philistine, no doubt, held in the time of David.

The Jews interpret the injunction “Thou shalt not seethe the kid in the mother’s milk,” to mean, that butter be not mixed with meat;[169]consequently they do not allow it to touch any pan, dish, platter, knife, spoon, or dresser used for their ordinary food. “Antagonism” being thus established between butter and their common diet, butter does not make “progression,” nor even hold its own. It is to be inferred, that the butter they knew contained,—in part at least,—the milk of goats, as would be the case in the Zahara method of churning.

It is first mentioned when Abraham entertains the angels. He took “butter and milk, and the calf he had dressed.”[170]Four centuries later, we have “Rivers of honey and butter;”[171]and butter compared with oil for “washing one’s steps.”[172]It then occurs in Moses’s song: “Butterofkine,milkofsheep, andfatof lambs.” It next appears in Deborah’s and Barak’s song: “He asked for water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.”[173]It is brought for David when he is fleeing from Absalom.[174]The wise man speaks of it as a wise man ought: “Thechurningof milk bringeth forth butter.”[175]The last mention is the most remarkable; it is Isaiah’s prophecy respecting Christ: “Butter and honey shall he eat, that he may know to refuse evil and choose good.” The word translated butter isimae,[176]which Calmet explains as “the scalded cream in use in the East.” Gesenius says, “Butter by the ancients, as well as by the orientals, was only used medically.” By others it is interpreted “curdled milk,” “cheese,” &c. In a word, the commentators have been as much put out by Jewish butter as the scholiast by Phœnician bread. Had curds or sour milk been meant, the proper name would have been given. Had Calmet known anything of the scalded cream “in use in the East,” he never could have supposed that it would be employed to wash with. None of these could be obtained bychurning. Then it is answered, that the Jews had no churn. There is no such word in Hebrew: the passage of Solomon is, “As thechurningof milk bringeth forth butter, so doth thewringingof the nose bring forth blood, and thestirring upof wrath bring forth strife.” The same word is employed throughout—mitz. But the word which could be translated “churning,” “wringing,” and “stirring up,” seems most happily adapted to describe the jerk and swing of the skin full of liquid on the camel’s back, or the process by which it was imitated.

In none of these passages, save the last, is butter spoken of as in use among Jews after the promulgation of the Ceremonial Law. Abraham and Job are anterior, so is the period to which Moses refers when he speaks of the good things which they had abused, and thereby incurred God’s displeasure. When brought forth in a “lordly dish,” it was by a Midianite offered to a Hazorite.[177]There was much conveyed to the Israelite in the epithet given to a dish in which butter could never be placed by him. When brought to David it is offered indeed to a Hebrew under the Ceremonial Law, but it might be for the Pelethites or Cerethian, who accompanied him; it is presented too by “one of the children of Ammon.” Solomon might be describing the practice of the neighbouring Arabs or Canaanites. In both the cases in which it is mentioned by Isaiah (ch. vii.), viz., that Christ shall eat it, and that the people shall be reduced to eat it, no reference is made to a present practice, and in both cases the sense of breaking the law may be conveyed.

The Old Testament thus entirely establishes the present usage of Morocco, and its identity with Palestine. There, as here, butter was made, and then, as now, the Philistine fried his muffins in butter, the Jew in oil.

One of the forms in which milk is most generally used, and of all, perhaps, the most healthful and agreeable, is unknown in Europe, and has no name amongst us: it is a curd (yumed) without rennet. It is used fresh, but may be drained of its whey and kept a considerable time. In travelling, it is hung in a bag, and, when very dry, rubbed down with fresh milk or water. This is theleben[178]of the Arabs and theyourt[179]of the Turks: it is also made in India, and calledtyre. It is made as follows:—the milk is heated to the point of boiling, and then allowed to cool down until the finger can be kept in it while you count three: a spoonful of the old yourt, mixed first with a little of the milk, is then poured in. It is put in a warm place (the temperature must not be under 70°), and in two or three hours it will have set. The process is one of fermentation: the milk is leavened. The first leaven of yourt, they say, was brought by Gabriel to Abraham. They, however, profess to be able to make it anew by repeating the above process during a fortnight, using on the first occasion a crab pounded in vinegar, or a silver spoon or button: I have succeeded in obtaining it without either the crab or the spoon. Milk after being brought to the boiling point, was allowed to sour; a spoonful of it was mixed on the second day, that again on the third, and so on till the fourteenth, when perfect yourt was obtained.

When staying at Lamlin in Hungary, I used to have yourt sent over from Belgrade: the Germans were very glad to get it, but had no idea of making it for themselves. So travellers from all countries of Europe have become acquainted with it, and learn its value as an economical food and its qualities as a healthy diet. Most of them like it, some of them give it the preference over everything else; yet no one has thought of introducing it at home. In Greece, before and during the revolution, it was, like baths, common use. “Civilization” came, and a wholesome food and a healthful practice were straightway expelled.

This species of curd, without the aid of the liquid found in the rennet of young animals, offers the explanation of practices of the Greeks, and suggests the possibility of unknown uses even of milk. The Greeks had cheese—or substances to which they applied that name—not made with rennet, and of which the description applies equally to yourt.[180]Their name for cheese,τυρὸς, is supposed to be derived from Tyre: the Indian name foryourtistyre. The Hindoos would not touch anything prepared with rennet. The Greeks made curd by vinegar,[181]pepper, burnt salt, the flowers of bastard saffron, and the threads on the head of the artichoke.[182]

Next to yourt comescaïmac: it is not, however, to us equally a stranger. The first day I spent in Devonshire was occupied in a discussion respecting the Phœnician settlements. It was maintained by several learned natives that of these there was nodirectproof. The next morning, walking with one of these gentlemen, we entered a cottage. “There,” I said, pointing to the fire, upon which some Devonshire cream was preparing, “is what you wanted last night.” There was an Eastern dish made in an Eastern manner—the earthenware pots and wood-fires:[183]the cottage was built oftapia. The name of the adjoining village wasTorr; direct proof why every second name is Hebrew. Besides the village there isTorquay,Torbay,TorAbbey. To the eastward there isSudbury; and, if that name be not derived from the ancient metropolis of Phœnicia, no one will dispute the derivation ofMarazion(Great Zion) from the Jewish metropolis.Beer-Ferrers andBeerAlsten are Hebrew for the Well of Ferrers, the Well of Alsten. Then there is theMenarrock, the riverCamel, and so many more.[184]Sir Richard Carew describes, in his day, mattings for hangingupon the walls:[185]they are precisely so used in Barbary. The Moorish house is the fac-simile of that of ancient Judæa; we may expect, then, to find a Phœnician dish in villages which retain Phœnician names, and are built according to the Phœnician fashion, and were covered, as late as the seventeenth century, with Phœnician matting.

Devonshire cream is made by heating the milk in a pan upon the fire, then allowing it to stand; the creamy and caseous parts collect on the top, and the watery part is drained off below. It may then be churned into butter: the “scalded cream of the East” is made by a similar process. The milk is poured into small shallow earthenware basins, which are put in the oven with a slow heat: the lighter part rises, and crusts. Gradually it hardens and thickens, until, by gathering up the whole substance, it forms a little dome. It is then lifted off like a cake, and a little colourless fluid remains at the bottom. This cream derives its name from the process of making it,caïmac, which meansburnt.[186]

“Cream” has in Latin the same meaning: it could not, therefore, have been originally applied as at present, and the first cream the European nations who employed the word had seen must have been “burnt;”—that is, caïmac. It was probably invented during the Crusades. All the nations of Europe use this word. It follows, that none of them could originally have had it; for, in that case, they would have had an original one. Spain is, however, an exception: the Spaniards did not take part in the Crusades.

Professor Ritter has made use of this art in tracing the ancient Scythians, and W. Von Humboldt has in like manner employed it in his remarkable work on the Basques. This is high tribute to the value of cookery in the profoundest inquiries; but the results show that, before it can be safely or successfully employed, philosophers must be cooks. Ritter confounds cheese and butter;[187]assumes, on the strength of the passage of Hippocrates,[188]on which I have above commented, butter to be a Scythian name, and butter to have been made by the Scythians. He then connects the Scythian compound from mares’ milk with the butter used as a medicine in Greece, which we know was made from cows’ milk, and the source of which I have already given. He does not trace any of the parallel words, or show a Scytho-German origin for “cream,” “milk,” “cheese,” &c.

Humboldt considers his case to be fully made out, and says that the same thing holds with the Iberians;[189]but, as to whether we are to infer that the Iberians were Scythians or Germans, he does not explain. He refers to no one term in use, or to any practice. We have seen that cream has no native name in any European dialect; that the name for butter in every land expresses gee, not churned butter; and the same thing holds even of the Tartars and Chinese, who, like the Slaavs, call it “cows’ oil.” The Spanish peninsula is an exception, and exhibits, not only one, but two systems of its own.

The Spanish has original words for cream and butter; the first isnata,[190]the secondmanteca. Manteca means also fat, so that it could not have been with them primitive: they do not use it now, save as an imported habit.

In the Basque provinces it is indigenous, as among the tribes of the Zahara, and for the dairy, in all its branches, they have original terms: milk iseznea, butterguria, and creambicaño. These terms are wholly distinct from Aramean, Greek, Scythian, German, or Celt. Between the north and south of the peninsula the difference in practice coincides with the difference of its terms; and both prove that two distinct people anciently inhabited it. It was next to impossible that such primitive terms should have been lost. The things were unknown to the Romans, and the words introduced to supplant them were not Roman. (Natais an adaptation of the Latinnatare.) More is not wanted to confirm the statement of Strabo, that the “Hispanirestrict the termIberiato the portion bounded by the river Iber.” The two races were Hispani and Iberi.

Connected with this subject is another peculiarity worth mentioning. The Greeks had two names for bread; the one the vulgar name, which I have already traced to the Brebers, and which is preserved in the modern dialect of Greece and of Andalusia, inψῶμιandacemite. The other isartos(ἄρτος). Now this word is pure Basque, and is found in a variety of compounds in their tongue. They have two words for bread,artoaandoguia: the first at present applied to maize, the second to barley; but the first is the primitive, being derived from “grinding with a stone;”[191]and as supplying the word for “dough,”artaoria(orea, mass). They haveartochiquia,artopellafor different preparations of flour. Now it may be asked, could the Greeks derive so primitive a word as “bread” from the Basques?[192]The explanation is given, by Socrates: “The Greeks had many words from the barbarians who werebefore them;” and the Basques were not always confined to the north of Spain. We know that they colonized Sicily, and traces of the language are to be found on the shores of the Euxine.

The settlement of the Celts in Italy was coeval with Rome. If they had known cream and used butter, the Romans must have had them: their ornaments, their bedding, the square and lozenge patterns, their soap, &c., are known to us. The words and usages are thus not to be considered as belonging to their common race, but as derived from the incidents of their own adventures.

In Gaelic, or more properlyErse,[193]the word for butter comes nearer to that of the Old Testament than the word employed by the Moors and Jews in Barbary. It isfin: in the genitive case it is the same as the Hebrew,fine. They have a second word which approaches equally to the Semetic gee. It isce. This appears to be the oiled butter which has now fallen into disuse.[194]Like the ancients they used it medicinally, and kept it till it was rancid. This is the third kind of butter known; and they have a third name,butter. This word they got where they gotfinandce. The medicinal use of butter has in these days been reduced to one spot of Africa—that is, Suz; and thence a traffic in it is carried on to Negroland, just as formerly it must have been exported from the whole coast of Barbary to Europe. This preparation is known to-day in the interior of Africa—precisely in the region where neither European nor Roman, nor Greek, could have spread it—asBudra. The word is given, and the substance described, in Jackson’s Vocabulary of the Shelloh dialect.

I have already shown that Pliny did not know whence the Romans had the word, and they never had the thing. The clans derived it directly from Barbary or Judæa hundreds of years before Pliny wrote. I need not here repeat what I have elsewhere said regarding the transposition of cognate letters.DandTare such. In adding, according to the Greek and Roman fashion, their termination, they would for euphony say, Butyron for Budron.

Cheese in Erse, isCaise,[195]pronounced Caishee. This, too, is supposed to come from the Romans, and the probability of this derivation is increased by Pliny’s statement, that the barbarians had no cheese; but we know that the Greeks had their cheese from the Phœnicians, since the wordτύρονis explained at least, as Tyrian. Phrygia exported even cheese of asses’ milk.[196]The old Arabs had a cheese of goats’ milk, not learnt from the Romans, for it had another name,Raïb. It is clear, then, that the Semetic races did not know the use of cheese, though, perhaps, as at present, they were not partial to it, and did not excel in making it. In the interior of Africa they do make cheese, and in the dialect of the great interior tribe extending from Morocco to the Red Sea, the name isagees. It is given in the French and Breber dictionaries.[197]The nearest approach the Romans could have made to agees would beacaseus: their word iscaseus. There is no need of the intervention of Rome to bring caise to the Celtic tribes.

In respect to the manufacture of butter by the clans;—even without the aid of etymology we must carry it to times long antecedent to its use in Europe. It is associated with their superstitions[198]—that is, their mythological era. They make it by the process still in use in Barbary from the whole milk,[199]as well as by that now employed in the north of Europe, from cream thrown up cold. They eat it mixed with sweetmeats and honey; and this practice is no less peculiar still in some parts of the East than in the Highlands.[200]Preserves may be traced back to the immediate progeny of Abraham. Jacob sends down to Egypt a present for Joseph. It is the choice things of the land, of course, and things not common in Egypt. The first is balm, the second honey;[201]but honey could be no rarity in Egypt. The word in Hebrew isdipsi. That is the name still in use for preserves made of grapes; and in Shaw’s time, the village of Hebron alone exported annually three hundred camel loads of it to Egypt.[202]There being no grapes in the Highlands, the clans took to other fruit, not forgetting the oranges they had been accustomed to in Spain. Butter—that I mean in present use—being a preparation of cream, and cream being, as I have shown, of very recent invention, and not yet traced to its source; the principal evidence of the originality of butter among the clans, must rest on the proof of their having been in possession of cream, and this, I think, I can establish most satisfactorily. I have said that the word cream is not known to them. Now, they have for it two rare names:hachdar, which, like the nata of the Spaniards, means the “part that swims,” andbarr, which signifies “top.” Skimmed milk they callbainne lòm, or milk “bare” or “naked;” they have also a term for “milk under cream,” which isbainne ce, orbainne fo che. It is impossible that so many, so comprehensive, and such descriptive terms, all of them ancient, should have been in use, if the substance to which they apply was not known, and if the invention had not been original. And this is remarkable, that while the names of the preparations in use in Judæa may etymologically be traced to domestic tongues, all the names for this one, which is not to be found in the east, are pure Celtic. Cream is a constituent part of the national food, and is so general, that the very dishes of the dinner-service have been modified to suit it. Dessert plates are like small soup plates, as it is the necessary accompaniment of every sweet dish.

They have the Eastern caïmac in the shape of Devonshire cream. It is known as “Carstorphine cream,” but it is going out of use. In the village which has given to it its Lowland name, it is no longer to be found, although the last generation of Edinburgh citizens used to repair thither on festal days to regale themselves all unconsciously on this Phœnician dainty.[203]

In Turkey neither of the Semetic words for butter has been adopted: they have an original one,—like the mantica of the Spaniards. It isyagh. It applies equally to butter, fat, and oil; the last they callzeïtin yaga, “olive-butter;” and butter they sometimes qualify byjost, or “milk-butter.” They, therefore, had none of their own; but I refer to their word from a singular coincidence with the Erse, in which language “tallow” isigh. It is at present pronouncedce, but the orthography is a record of a more ancient pronunciation. The great Sclavonic family is in like manner without a word for butter. They call it oil.[204]

The last point of identification with the East which I shall adduce, is the name of the substance which is the basis of all these compounds—milk. In Erse, it isbainne; in Arabic,chaleb. Here are not two consonants the same; to the ear there is no trace of resemblance, yet they are from one root, from which also comegala,[205]lac, andmilk. Bainne is derived from the Gaelic,ban, white.Lebanon(without the Greek terminationLe ban), is known to have been so called from its colour, white. Leben is sour milk in Arabic, and from the same root as chaleb.

The clans are indebted to no one for their cheese; for their name for coagulated milk is derived from themaw, in which the rennet is found. It is calleda bhinnbeach. The stomach, or rennet, isbinid. They have a variety of other dishes[206]and names—[207]so extensive, indeed, as to lead to the inference that at some time they must have been essentially, if not like the tribes of the Zahara exclusively, pastoral, and restricted for their food to the produce of the dairy.

The Highlanders have the greatest variety of dishes made from milk. They have the richest dairy, and the richest vocabulary: the words are partly derivative, partly original, as might have been expected from a practical and pastoral people, taking service amongst the different nations with whom these preparations were in use. They learned the usages of each, and retained them, with their names, so that the usages and the words show the Highlanders to have been in communication with the people who had Turkishcaïmac, Hindoogee, and Moorishsimin;—in other words, that they had been in the Holy Land before Phœnician usages had been extinguished, or, that when they were in Morocco the present habits were to be found.

“It often happens, that in seeking for the origin of a word a much wider field of inquiry opens, and if carefully pursued, leads to unexpected conclusions, bearing on the history, belief, manners, and customs of primitive times, and so as to leave no doubt of the occurrence of particular events, or of the existence of peculiar customs, respecting which history is entirely silent, and of the falsity of other things, handed down undoubtingly in her pages. Etymology is the history of the languages of nations, which is a most important part of their general history. It is the lamp by which that which is obscure in the primitive history of the world will one day be lighted up.”[208]

It is, indeed, the lamp, but not the light. The wick must be touched by living flame before it ignites. That flame is custom. The pursuit of mere sound—the affinities of roots—are but landscapes in the clouds, until you get things substantial, with which they are associated, and on which the light of etymology may be brought to shine.

A distinction between the use of butter and oil for simmering muffins and crumpets in Morocco, furnishes a link between those eaten in the Temple of Solomon and those sold in the streets of London, and thereby supplies evidence to fix the Cassiterides, while incidentally, it disposes of a great historical and ethnographic question, the wanderings of the Celts.

An admirable product has been used for thousands of years in this region, and no Jason has come to carry it away. Yet Julius Cæsar and Count Julian, Sartorius, and Belisarius, CharlesV,, with many other shrewd persons, have tasted Moorish butter. The Andalusians are delighted to get a little pot of it, but as to learning how to make it, that never entered into their philosophy. So yourt, made in every tent or hut, from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic, is unknown in Europe. A magic line defines the domain of chops, of boiled potatoes, of chocolate, of coffee. One race can boil, another cannot:e.g.the English.[209]One race can roast, another cannot; and each is utterly incapable of comprehending the faculty conferred on the other. There is a land congenial to pilaff, another to kuskoussou, another to mutton-broth. Devonshire cream, polecuta, poi curry, have, like an insect on a moss, their zone. You may transplant trees, and transfer royal houses, carry forth religions, and distribute all around slips of constitutions—but a dish!—no!—as there is more in a costume than covering the back, so is there more in a dish than filling the belly.

There yet remains one term unexamined. Whence comesdairy? There is no such word on the Continent; it is neither Latin nor Teutonic. It has no Celtic root. I have been describing the douar, which is indeed a camp; but the features which forced themselves upon my attention belonged to the sheepfold. The people are shepherds. In every tent the chief utensils are the milk-pails, leathern churns, and butter-pots; the chief produce and food, milk and butter. Why is the Arab camp a circle? It is to fold the cattle. Thence the name, douar and deïra. The exploits of Abd-el-Kadir and hisDeïrahave made the word familiar to us in Europe. It is the very word we apply to the fold’s produce.[210]From the same root isgadeira,gadir, an enclosure—the name of Cadiz, the only city upon earth in which the cow or ewe is not to be found, nor any animal whatever giving milk! How, it may be asked, could the word come to us?Tally ho!is in English an unmeaning word. The rallying cry of the Arab in war isTalla hu!Tally ho! doubtless, was brought by the Crusaders. Dairy may have been learnt then, or many a century before.

The pursuit of a word is like “hunt the slipper.” It is here, it is there. There would be no game unless it were slipped under. There wasBabia, the goddess of infants, in Phœnicia; there arebabiesin England. No doubt it is the same slipper, though we cannot tell under what petticoat it has slipped.

Sheeps’ heads, with the skin left on, are in Morocco, as in Scotland, carried to the smithy to be singed. “Singed heads” were never twice invented in the world.[211]Things that are worth anything, are only invented once. The crop is sown, the weeds only come up of themselves. There is nothing without its history, if we only knew it. Whatever is, had a beginning. That only is worth looking for which we do not know.

[118]See “History of Civilization,” passim.

[119]The Americans call crumpets muffins, so that the latter must have been the common name at the time of the early emigration westward.

[120]In the culinary language of our country, I use this term to supply the place of “plat,” and “met.”

[121]Africa,vol. ii. p.4.

[122]Poll. Onomastlib. vi.74.

[123]Ὁ δὲ σιτοποιὸς χειρίδας ἔχων καὶ περὶ τῷ στόματι κημὸν ἔτριβε τὸ σταὶς ἵνα μηδὲ ἱδρὼς ἐπιῤῥέῃ, μήτε τοῖς φυράμασιν ὁ τρίβων ἔπνέοι.—Athen., lib. xii.70.

[124]Athen. lib. iii.77; Idem,lib. xiv.54; Poll.lib. vi.32; Idem,lib. vi.75; Schol. Aristoph. Archar. 86.

[125]Rabbi Solomon translates it “wafer.”

[126]Abdul-melich asked the old Mechyumian, what meat he liked best; he answered, an ass’s neck well seasoned and well roasted. “What say you,” says Abdul-melich, “to a leg or shoulder of a sucking lamb, well roasted and covered over with milk and butter?” Abulpheda remarks on this passage, “the Arabians had not then changed their cookery from what it was in the time of Abraham.”

[127]The Crusader, Baldwin, is known to the Arabs as Barduil. Portugal they make Portgun. Labunitus of Homer, is written Nabunitus by Berosius. The exchange ofbandmis so common, as almost to be a rule; and thence, perhaps, that strange word biffin for baked apples, resembling in shape the muffin.

Mr. Layard mentions, that the Yezidis, who abhor all imprecations, will not use the wordnaal, “horse-shoe,” because it approaches tolaana “curse.”—Nineveh,vol. i. p.296.

[128]The Dutch have one of the best sweet dishes, which they peculiarly honour by decorated booths at their fairs, set apart for its preparation. Like the muffin, it is flour and water set for three hours to ferment: it is then poured, not on a griddle, but on heated tongs with deep bars, so that it comes out with the shape of a portcullis; it is then eaten like the sfen, with sugar or honey.

[129]The Turks call the muffinGassi Cadaëf. This is also run on the griddle through a tin mould with holes, and so forms coils of thread like vermicelli. This is calledTel(wire)Cadaëf. These dainties are described in a Turkish cookery book; Genek Rizalisè, by Negib Effendi,A.H.1259,A.D.1842.

[130]The English roll out the dough and then put dabs of butter on it, and then roll it again. The fee for learning to make flake-pastry, as described above, is five guineas.

[131]They also use rice for the same purpose, reducing it by boiling. The pastry prepared from it is calledkuladj.

[132]The round copper dish in use in the East, and which is carried hot from the fire and placed on thesofra, or table, theτήγανονof the Greeks.

[133]Khalil Dhaheri mentions it also. The passage is quoted by Volney, and he translates itindigo. May there not be some connexion between the Egyptian name, and the old goddess Neith, and also with the English wordknead?

[134]Nouv. Missions, t. ii. p.73.

[135]On making inquiries respecting it, I have received the following reply from Cirencester.

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